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Chapter 3: Stop Talking and Thinking

LSD, marijuana, mescaline, or any drug, gives you only a good sleep, and in that good sleep you dream. Those dreams are colorful, and your life is so poor and your life is such a misery that you would even like to live those dreams rather than live in this miserable life. You would choose - if that was the only choice - to live in a beautiful dream rather than to live in this miserable life. This life is like a nightmare. Even if a drug is only going to give you a luminous dream, colorful, three-dimensional, why not take it? - because what is there in this life? Because life is in such a mess, you choose dreams.

Drugs, alcohol, or other sorts of intoxicants have always been used by religious people, but through them you never move into reality. Through them you fall into a torpor, into a coma, and in that coma you can have dreams.

And if you have been thinking too much about God, you can see God, because you can project your own dreams. Dreams can be directed and guided. If you have been thinking too much of Christ, then while under the influence of a drug Christ will appear to you. This is your own mind playing games. If you have been too much attached to Krishna then he will be standing there with his flute on his lips, singing and dancing. If a Hindu, a devotee of Krishna, takes LSD he will see Krishna, and a Christian will see Jesus, and a Buddhist will see Buddha - but these are mind projections.

Reality is miserable, but don’t hanker after dreams, because if you hanker after dreams then there is only one way: how to help the conscious become unconscious again. A small part has come up out of unconsciousness, and that is the beauty of a human being; agony and ecstasy both, but that is the beauty of a human being - that he has become an island in a vast unconscious. This island has to grow higher and higher so it becomes a continent. Through drugs it will again go underwater, you will live again the life of an animal or a tree: beautiful in themselves but not worthy of you, because you are losing so much. And you could have attained reality; that island could have become a continent.

But not only drugs - there are other subtle means also to help the conscious become unconscious. Through music it can be done, through chanting it can be done. If you repeat a mantra continuously you will fall asleep, because anything monotonous brings a coma.

They are subtle means, not like drugs on the surface. In every temple, church, it is going on - and temples and churches are against drugs, and they don’t know what they are doing. They are also using subtle drugs, not so crude as LSD or marijuana but still drugs - because when you chant a certain word continuously it gives you sleep, it cannot give you anything else. You relax. The very chanting gives you a deep boredom. The same word “Ram, Ram, Ram,” you go on, you go on, you go on. What will you do? Because mind remains alert only if something new is happening, otherwise mind goes to sleep. If something new is happening then mind is alert. If nothing new is happening, only, “Ram, Ram, Ram,” a chanting, and you know that again and again it will happen, infinitely, the mind starts feeling sleepy.